Change is an inevitable aspect of the commercially competitive landscape of television, but there needs to be protection afforded to the fine craft of reportage, all the more so in times and areas of public disinterest, just as there is to endangered animal species. Former Panorama producer Kevin Sutcliffe, now responsible for the award-winning Dispatches and Unreported World strands at the UK Channel 4, feels that change and protection are perfectly compatible. Whereas he feels that while BBC current affairs is still struggling to move on from its past lost authoritative pre-eminence, Channel 4’s more diverse, individualistic approach has enabled it to weather change better:
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I think people have become aware that the world is a much more dangerous place, and that’s the sensibility we cater to. They want to know
more about that dangerous world and that’s what brings them to serious current affairs . . . Dispatches has become much clearer what its priorities are, and currently it is Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, which we may return to at least six times in a year. It means I can’t do the subjects I might have found quite interesting in the past but, because we have a clear proposition, we can punch above our weight . . . Dispatches is on air 40 weeks a year at 8.00 pm on Monday – up from 32 last year – and that’s a serious commitment to hard investigative journalism in a prime spot . . . Where else [in the UK]
can you find an hour of in-depth current affairs television every week on prime-time terrestrial television? It should be happening on the BBC, but it’s not.30
This chapter has largely concentrated on high-end reporting, the laudable aim of the best not just to make a name but to make a difference. But the increasingly transitory nature of broadcast commissions puts more and more reporters and producers in the fingernail club of the freelance world. The desire to rock the boat is more than offset by the imminent capsizing of a career. And a combination of increasingly determinist forms of editorial control and tighter deadlines makes it all the less likely that the reporter has the freedom or the time to evolve an independent line of inquiry. In the same way that the face that addresses the camera is often no more than the mouthpiece of the unseen producer behind, the rise and fall of programmes and their messages is also determined by the ebb and flow of the powerful but often unremarked tides of media politics. As James Curran and Jean Seaton suggest, in their seminal study of media politics, Power Without Responsibility, the regulatory framework of British broadcasting keeps the broadcasters in a role of uneasy subservience to the state:
Broadcasters have come to see the state as their enemy. Yet broadcasting institutions ultimately depend on the state for their legitimisation. This authority cannot be replaced by a pluralist ideal of reflecting social and cultural variety. Indeed the adoption of this principle has left broadcasters peculiarly vulnerable to the more general attack on public service broadcasting.31
The stakes are high precisely because reportage at the highest level reveals flaws at the highest level. The best reporters have not only paid their dues but been to places and seen things denied to most of us. The doyen of news presenters in the UK, the main host of Channel 4 News, Jon Snow earned his authority from over three decades of tramping the world as a foreign reporter, and he still leaves the studio to report big events, conferences and disasters from the front line. He is a genial and intensely fair-minded man, but is not wedded to old school ideas of balance, as he writes in the postscript to his book, Shooting History:
I am a politically motivated journalist, but not in the party-political sense. I even argue that we are the best kind of journalists, we who are fuelled by passion and determination to alert our fellow human beings to the truth.
I suppose the central truth that I have arrived at . . . is that in our immediate age, the war without end that is the ‘war on terror’ is proving a dangerous and wrongheaded strategy that is driving communities apart at home and abroad. It threatens to fracture our world. The contorting of events to fit an ideologically-based global analysis is proving more dangerous by the day.32
A very different kind of television reporter has grown from other traditions, the video diary (Chapter 4) and the travelogue (Chapter 13). In the way that earlier masters of written reportage made extended pen portraits of distant parts of the world and their experiences in them, lightweight video and DV cameras have empowered a new wave of travellers with sound and vision. Many operate at the cheap and light end of the market, investigating various aspects of hedonism and youth culture, from clubbing to extreme sports. For instance, Ashley Haynes became very well known for his exploits exploring the Sin Cities of the world in two 15-part series for UK satellite channel Bravo, bravely sampling countless sexual delights and perversions for the audience while maintaining a quizzical, self-deprecating eye for the camera. His personality and humour rise above the often tawdry nature of his subject matter.
Sean Langan, operating at the other end of the journalistic spectrum where few would like or dare to go, brings a very twenty-first century take to on-camera reporting. He has perfected the use of the hand-held camera to record intimate details in dangerous regions such as Iraq and Afghanistan and his own reactions and thoughts at the same time. His camera captures his own responses in every eventuality from fear to fun, interview to personal reflection. He achieves a unique insight to situations beyond the reach of conventional cameras, chatting with the Taliban or with Shia women, and bringing a much-needed humanity and understanding to arenas of conflict. Films made for Dispatches in 200633saw Langan dodging bullets in a firefight and penetrating deep into a Taliban mountain stronghold.
Consistent with his confessional camera style is the honesty with which he reveals the terror that such moments can produce, and the wish that he hadn’t come this far. Not for him the traditional machismo of the war reporter: this is a very modern response to the problems reporters face.
Sean Langan fell into television by accident – as a features journalist heading for Kashmir and asked to take a camera along to make a video diary (about which series, more in Chapter 4). So technically inexpert was he then that Langan says the BBC technicians taped up all the controls on his Hi-8 video camera save the on–off button, yet so extraordinary was the material that he shot following up the trail of Kashmir kidnappers and their victims that it launched him on an award-winning career:
Because I wasn’t a there making a TV programme, I was there as a journalist and I got so carried away with the story and I got to know the family of the hostage and it became genuinely a very personal journey I was just filming and, as a result, I think it’s definitely
Figure 1.1
Sean Langan displays his trademark hand-held camera technique
the best TV I’ve ever done, compared to all my other stuff. Two reasons: I got very involved in it, passionately involved, I got caught up in the whole thing, looking for these hostages. I wasn’t there thinking: ‘I’m a TV guy making a documentary’, and yet I did religiously film everything and that helped it; but that whole thing that I was genuinely there for six months . . . Even then I realised that this was the way I wanted to make documentaries, find something you’re passionately interested in and find the time to follow it through and, if you’ve got the time, that will compensate for a million other faults. At the same time I realised that, having found the way I wanted to work, there lies a zero career because, to wait until you find a story close to your heart, and then take as long as it takes, in today’s television you won’t have a career.34
Sean Langan’s trademark style is the way he holds his camera at arm’s length, enabling him to swivel the lens to capture his own comments, reactions and laconic asides, whether interviewing Taliban insurgents or dodging bullets with a British army in a firefight. He finds it unnerving to be asked learned questions about this method at documentary conferences because he admits the style emerged from him being too lazy to carry the tripod he was originally sent out with to do his reflective diary pieces on.
The flouting of conventions undoubtedly helped reinvigorate the documentary form, and many people feel that Current Affairs departments would be stronger if more had taken a more robust and innovative approach to their programme-making, keeping abreast of audiences’ changing needs and perceptions. As Langan says, there was and maybe still is a view that serious stuff should be like ‘eating your greens’, something not very pleasant but good for you. He sees no reason why all forms of television shouldn’t try equally hard to entertain and his view is that his best work comes from those natural, revealing human moments that emerge unprompted, whereas his least successful is when it is freighted with a preordained thesis or the pressures of a commissioner hungry for a timely result. Ed Braman, who edits the Unreported World strand for Channel 4, agrees:
The only options in current affairs were either to be pointy-headed or to be vulgar . . . We spent so much time pretending we were the elite, that current affairs was the television equivalent of Latin, it was only to be dealt with like Oxford Greats by a certain esoteric bunch of people who could speak seven different languages and knew the calibre of the Taliban’s weapons . . . We developed a belief, that was shared across all current affairs programmes, that were elite private little clubs, that it was our job to tell the stories not that people wanted to hear but the stories people ought to hear . . . Today we talk about narrative storytelling. If current affairs had done that job earlier, and understood that that was what our job was, if we had understood real lessons from documentarists, a lot of these problems would have been attenuated early on.35
Whereas Peter Taylor’s films are the considered distillation of a large amount of research, enabling him to command a clear line by which he leads us through complex stories, Sean Langan’s work uses the travails of his travels as the narrative. The viewer shares the journey and its revelations as they happen. Of course, the apparent serendipity of these journeys underplays his considerable experience and the planning and negotiations that get him into these often extraordinary situations. But Langan’s films do not pretend to the commanding overview, they offer an intimate perspective from the ground, the front line. They succeed
through the sheer force of personality and skill of Langan himself, largely working alone.
One sofa-bound critic regretted Langan’s failure to ask the Taliban more probing questions but, quite apart from the questionable sense of being difficult when guns are trained on you, that is not Langan’s style. He gets up close and personal with whomever he meets, Tommies and Taliban alike. The way they respond is very much part of getting to understand these men better. In 2008, Langan paid the penalty of getting that close, being kidnapped in the Pakistan–Afghanistan border region. Because of the remoteness and Langan’s lonely way of working, it was three weeks before his family and Channel 4 employers found out, and three months before they secured his release. Traumatised, and having been subjected to mock executions, he tells me that the experience has entirely wiped out his short-term memory. Such is the price of dedication to reportage.
Getting up close and personal – while hopefully affording reporters some measure of protection – is the main justification for using ‘embedded’ correspondents in wars, notably in the 2003 Iraqi invasion. Reporters who camped and tramped with individual military units were able to film hitherto unseen aspects of war and share its impact and hardships.
‘Embedding’ journalists . . . has brought warfare home to us as no war has been brought home before’, says former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell. However, critics of this device argue that this is a very effective way of controlling the media by getting them focused on the minutiae, all seen from one side and too closely bonded to their units to take a critically detached view. Reporters from across the political spectrum have also attacked the abuse of the Green Book in Afghanistan – a contract drawn up between the UK Ministry of Defence and media organisations to guarantee maximum press freedom while preserving operational security (Opsec) – which was actually invoked to support reporters who toe the MOD line, a subject we shall return to in Chapter 9. Research undertaken by the Cardiff University School of Journalism for the BBC after the Iraq invasion found elements of truth in both positions. Professor Justin Lewis, deputy director of the Cardiff journalism school, said at the NewsXchange conference in Budapest in November 2003:
The criticisms that were made at the time, that the embedded reporters were more likely to give a pro-war spin, do not hold up. But we do have some reservations, particularly about the narrative that is created by embedded reports, where the only discussion is about who’s winning and who’s losing, with little of the wider picture.36
The study also found that television reports produced by embedded correspondents during the conflict in Iraq gave a ‘sanitised’ picture of war. Those who were concerned about that sanitising effect and refused the stifling embrace of the military minders in Iraq were more liable to pay the ultimate price, as did the ITN’s experienced war reporter, Terry Lloyd, who was killed by that worst of all euphemisms, ‘friendly fire’. The inquest in October 2006 found that Lloyd had been unlawfully killed by US troops firing on the minibus in which the already injured Lloyd was being evacuated from the battlefield. The Oxford coroner said:
‘I have no doubt that it was an unlawful act to fire on this minibus.’ Lloyd’s cameraman and translator were also killed, but absolved of any mistake or lack of preparation in this assign-ment. The General Secretary of the UK National Union of Journalists, Jeremy Dear added:
The killing of journalists with impunity must never, ever go unpunished. Any attempt to silence journalists in this way must never succeed. The inquest verdict has confirmed what
we always suspected: that Terry’s death was not an accident in the theatre of war but a callous act of murder.37
These are the very real risks that reporters who work in the front line face. The Committee for the Protection of Journalists lists 66 confirmed deaths of journalists in the line of duty during 2007, 32 of them in Iraq, and a further 22 yet to be confirmed.38Most reporters choose not to work in such lethal zones, but the same key qualities distinguish all good reporters:
passion, preparation and precision. They bring to their craft an uncompromising dedication and determination that not many people associate with work. They undertake meticulous research and planning as to how best to capture and frame their story. And they have a real respect for detail, knowing that every word and picture can make the difference to the credibility and to the effect of its final form.